Former chapel of the abbey of Port Royal

The chapel you are approaching was once the heart of one of the most intellectually charged sites in seventeenth-century France. Known as the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, it was built in the late sixteen forties for a community of nuns who became the center of a profound religious and political movement called Jansenism. The movement emphasized strict devotion and personal piety, which put the sisters at direct odds with both the powerful Jesuit order and King Louis the fourteenth himself. Because the nuns and their supporters refused to renounce their beliefs, the monarchy eventually suppressed the order, dispersed the sisters, and largely dismantled their original rural retreat. While that original abbey was razed to the ground, this Parisian site survived the centuries by being repurposed, eventually becoming a quiet, hidden corner within the grounds of the modern Cochin Hospital.